Michels touts outsider, leadership credentials in Oconto campaign stop

OCONTO – Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels pushed conservative themes while touting his leadership and outsider credentials in a visit to Oconto on Tuesday.

Michels said while the top priority of politicians is to get reelected, he was running to serve the people of Wisconsin.

“Like Donald Trump, he didn’t have to run for president, I don’t have to run for governor,” Michels told a lunchtime crowd of about 40 people at Irish Greens Golf Course. “He wanted to go drain the swamp, I want to get Madison headed in the right direction. With leadership, great things can happen in this state.”

It was Michels’ only reference during his 40-minute stop to the former president, who in early June endorsed Michels. Former Gov. Tommy Thompson endorsed Michels last week.

The visit to Oconto was the first on a two-day campaign swing that kicked off Tuesday morning at Michels’ campaign Green Bay headquarters, and was to take him to northern into northwest Wisconsin.

Michels filed in April to seek the Republican nomination for the right to face Democratic incumbent Tony Evers in November. In the Aug. 9 primary, he’s facing former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, state Rep. Timothy Ramthun and Oak Creek businessman Adam Fischer. Business consultant Kevin Nicholson dropped out the race on July 5.

Michels said, “the polls say we’re winning by double digits,” though a Marquette University Law School Poll released on June 22 found Michels was ahead of Kleefisch by 1 point – 27% to 26% – well within the 4-point margin of error. Ramthun was at 3%, with 32% undecided.

“You know what, I’m not a career politician,” he said. “I don’t care about polls. I care about what people are telling me on the street, at the festivals, at parades.”

Michels — who unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 2004 — said he’s being told it’s time for “an outsider, a non-politician, a businessman,” to lead the state.

“I have one constituency. … I’m not listening to the lobbyists, the PACs, the special interests, my one constituency is the hardworking, taxpaying law-abiding citizens of Wisconsin,” he said to applause.

Michels criticized Evers, calling him a “weak leader who's failed Wisconsin from COVID to Kenosha,” charging that Evers didn't act strong enough to end riots in that city following the shooting of a Black man by a police officer in August 2020.

The criticism has been a frequent one of Republicans, though Evers defended his response, saying the state fulfilled every request the city made.

Michels also derided Evers, who served as Superintendent of Public Instruction before being elected governor, as an “educrat” and contended that education in Wisconsin is getting worse.

“I will reform education as well in Wisconsin,” he said. “Through universal school choice, we will empower parents. We will have less CRT and more ABCs in our schools.”

The Michels campaign did not respond to an email seeking details about his claim about the double-digit lead and which schools in the state were teaching critical race theory by the time this story was published. Typically taught in graduate schools or law schools, CRT states that racism is embedded into social systems like education, housing and criminal justice.

Michels also touched on several conservative themes, saying he’ll “get election integrity back in this state” by making sure people who identified themselves as “indefinitely confined” because of COVID-19 have to reapply for the status, as well as being “tough on crime,” pro-gun and pro-life.

Michels also said that his was “a story of American success,” noting he spent 12 years in the Army, served as a Ranger and commanding officer who led hundreds of soldiers and now leads a company with his brothers that employs more than 8,000 people.

The company – Michaels Corp., which builds a wide range of infrastructure across the country, from tunnels transmission lines – grew from just a few hundred employees “despite government bureaucracy, despite excessive taxation, despite the government attitude of so many on the left, as Barack Obama said, ‘you didn’t build that.’”

“We did build that, with a lot of hardworking people at our side, thousands of great paying jobs … like building the Keystone Pipeline, which we were doing on the inauguration day” when Biden signed an order canceling the project, he said.

“That night, he’s dancing at his inaugural ball … we had to lay off hundreds of hardworking men and women.”

Michels claimed the result was today’s high gas prices, which “are driving up the price of everything … that’s what happens when we have career politicians in charge of things that have no real-life experience.”

Fact checks by several news organizations, however, have disputed that cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline – an extension of the Keystone Pipeline from Canada into the U.S. – resulted in higher pump prices.

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Contact Kent Tempus at (920) 431-8226 or ktempus@gannett.com. 

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Wisconsin governor candidate Tim Michels brings campaign to Oconto